Urban Design and the Creation of Videogame Cities

My Urban Design and the Creation of Videogame Cities talk from Develop: Brighton 2017 now handily available in the form of a slightly edited and abridged article. Huzzah! The video complete with Q&A — for those who attended the 2017 conference — is available here. More information on the subject and on my work on virtual urbanism can be found over at my game-cities.com site.

This talk/article, which I’ve tried to fill with as much useful information as possible, is an attempt to provide game designers and world builders with a spectrum of tools, ideas, and ways of thinking that will improve their game cities and interactive urban environments.

An attempt to help things move even further from the simplistic banality of ancient Police Quest-esque cities.

Urbanism, you see, both actual and imaginary, is incredibly complex, but I do hope that enough ground and most of the basics will get covered.

Unlike the majority of artists who get to do most of the interpretation of cities for their audiences themselves, in games we can only do part of this interpretation. The rest is up to the players; it is they who get to directly…